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Hamelman-esque Sourdough Pizza Dough

November 10, 2012 - 6:05am

Steve H

Hamelman-esque Sourdough Pizza Dough

I am trying to make a sourdough pizza based upon my favorite sourdough recipe, the Hamelman Vermont Sourdough. I've decided that the way to do this is to try to adapt the sourdough recipe to the pizza dough recipe in his Bread book. I'd appreciate any comments or suggestions since this is the first time I have tried to adapt one of the recipes this dramatically:

Vermont Sourdough Pizza Dough

Overall Formula

Baker's %

Bread Flour

464 g

90%

Rye Flour

51.6 g

10%

Water

351 g

68%

Salt

9.28 g

1.8%

Extra Virgin Olive Oil

25.8 g

5%

Total

902 g

174.8%

Liquid Levain Build

Bread Flour

81.3 g

100%

Water

102 g

125%

Mature Culture

16.3 g

20%

Total

199 g

Final Dough

Bread Flour

383 g

Rye Flour

51.6 g

Water

249 g

Salt

9.28 g

Liquid Levain

199 g

Total

902 g

1. Liquid Levain: Make the final build 12-16 hours before the final mix, and let stand in a covered container at about 70F.

2. Mixing: Add all of the ingredients to the mixing bowl, including the levain, but not the olive oil. Mix until ingredients are incorporated; correct hydration to achieve medium consistency dough. Drizzle in olive oil and continue mixing. Mix until there is moderate gluten development.

3. Bulk Fermentation: 2.5 hours.

4. Folding: Fold the dough once, after 1.5 hours.

5. Dividing and Shaping: Divide dough into 453 g pieces, sprinkle with flour, and let rest 20 minutes. Work the pizza into a 16 inch round.

6. Final Fermentation: No final fermentation is needed. Transfer dough to peel with semolina flour sprinkled on it. Add sauce and toppings.

Caputo is regular old AP. Most folks don't have Caputo to make pizza or any 00 flour either. There is a tendency to over do the bread flour thinking the gluten is required for pizza. There is also a tendency to over do the hydration as well. I assume we are talking thin crust pizza here. If it were me, I would at least halve the bread flour replacing it with unbleached AP, get the hydration down to around 63% and up the olive oil some too.

If you want a more healthy and tasty pie, you might want to get the whole grains up to 20% using some spelt and WW (or KA WWW) with the rye and increasing the hydration to 67%. All AP flour would be around 60% hydration for me but others would want 58% as his favorite hydration for pizza.

You can also use some Mojo de Ajo for some of the olive oil to get some garlic flavor, replace some of EVOO with sundried tomatoes packed in olive oil and throw in some fresh minced roesmary too and have a very tasty pie base that can also be used as focaccia bread.

You are certainly heading in the right direction. I'm guessig there are a gazillion really good pizza dough recipes and just as many folks swearing they have the best one :-)

Thank you for the delicious suggestions! I think I am going to keep it simple for now. I will consider using some AP flour, although I've been very happy with the consistency and flavor of the vermont sourdough with the bread flour. I am curious-- I thought my hydration was 68% based on the mass of flour divided by the mass of water. Am I doing it wrong?

calculation is correct at 68% Vermont SD is some fine bread and if you want Vermont bread for pizza dough. I wouldn't change a thing if that is what you want. Usually pizza dough isn't Vermont bread dough though.

Most pizza dough has EVOO in it and a rough rule of thumb is 10 g EVOO per 15o g of flour so you could double your amount and have no fears of it being cakey.

Personally, I don't think bread flour is needed or wanted for pizza dough. I do like the whole grains though and usually go for 20% in pizza dough because I think it has a full and deep flavor. The most whole grain the higher the hydration needed.

Many AP pizza doughs seem to come in at 58 to 60% hydration - pizza isn't holey ciabatta. You want something that is extensible yet strong enough to not tear when stretched and not so elastic it shrinks up. 10% whole grain dough would have a little less water that 68%. That might even be a little high for 20% whole grain. But that is just me and I once used a higher hydration.

Other Fresh Loafians will have other ideas. One way to snoop around is to go to the search function. There has to be a zillion recipes for pizza dough and you can get a good feel where oil, water and flours usually are for pizza. But, Vermont SD is as good as any.

Hope this helps

I just checked some of my old pizza doughs and throwing out the garbanzo bean ones, corn flour and others, I did find one very similar to yours that was half bread flour, 25% whole grains and had your 25 g of EVOO with similar flour amounts. It came in at a little less than 72% hydration. We liked it too - just not as much as the Focaccia Romama with 20% Whole Grain, the rest AP flour and 67% hydration.

There is no one great pizza dough. The trick is modifying your dough formula to get the type of crust YOU want.

As far as modifying hamelmans SD into a pizza dough, I actually don't think it needs much modification at all. Great pizza dough is just great bread dough stretched into a pizza shape. Here are the only modifications I would make: up the total salt to at least 2%. 1.8% is a little mild for my tastes especially for pizza dough. I think you could even push it to 2.2% and get great results.

Second, I like to use a small amount of instant yeast in my pizza doughs just to make sure it gets a little extra pop and volume when it hits the stone. Try .1% in the final dough.

Third, if you're going to add olive oil to the formula I would lower the water percentage by 2-3%. When baking pizza in a home oven I've found an overall hydration of around 68-70% to get really good results. The home oven just doesn't get hot enough to handle higher hydrations very well.

I was thinking of bringing down the olive oil percentage. I am worried it will affect the texture of the dough a bit too much, although I imagine some softening is probably in order. Some websites say the oil helps get a nice brown crust as well. The vermont sourdough makes a quite toothy crust... I am talking myself into cutting back the oil significantly, because i don't want the crust to be too cake-ey.

One way to lower the oil % is to brush it on after shaping the dough and before putting on toppings. This will help with the browning without affecting the dough itself (and tastes good too). To some people adding oil is "against the rules", but for me I like to add a little.

I have seen recipes from both Hamelman and Reinhart that have about 5-6% oil. So I am not too worried about breaking canon on this one. But I think I am going to try to go lighter on the oil than they both recommend and do the brush thing like you suggested. That's a good pizza technique anyways to keep the topping's moisture out of the dough and probably helps cook the toppings better anyways, serving the same function as oil does in a pan.

Thanks for the tips! (Thanks everybody for chiming in and for the feedback) I think im going to keep the recipe as-is for now except i will half the oil and add about 10% more salt. I've tried both the rye and WW versions of the vermont sourdough and I liked the rye better so I am going to go with that. WW crust would be a whole other project-- one that I have a spelt sourdough recipe waiting in the wings to play with...

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